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289 - What does an omniphage do when its host dies? [Cherno]
🕑 Added 2025-07-10 00:39:37 +0000 UTCA/N: Added Solomon Howitzer thaumaturgy creation/finalization poem to end of ch288.
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Krahe crawled out from under the monstrosity before the ensuing waterfall of viscera could splash down onto her, let alone before the scornbeast proper could crush her beneath its prodigious bulk. She even went so far as to exit sideways and skim on her way out just in case the monstrosity’s death-knell were a final attempt on her life. It remained upright, joints locked in precarious equilibrium, but as she walked around it, letting off a veritable pillar of purge remnants, the scornbeast shifted in place. It was dead in every way that mattered, but even an entirely unmodified human head separated from its shoulders could survive for a solid half-minute. One could only wonder how long this brick shithouse would take to fully realize it was dead.
In the meanwhile, realizing she hadn’t gotten the chance to properly text a smoke burster, Krahe formed one and just tossed it at the corpse. She didn’t take much extra time in its formation, yet she was still able to adjust the design without issue. As it arced and fell right through the hole her Solomon Howitzer had carved, its shell cracked, the smoke began to “leak out.” The burst came just before it hit the ground, but the shell didn’t truly burst. It opened, its hexagonal plates stretching apart, held together by an inner layer of Tar. A cloud — more of a swarm, really — spilled out, enveloping the body, writhing around it, carving at its skin and filing down the edges of its armor. A shift of intent sufficed to halt the assault and turn the cloud-swarm into no more than a visual obstacle. Her deathsmoke had ceased being smoke at Mirzaii 2, but now she finally had control over it, and just as the Itano Tracer and Lasher, this, too, resembled an armament with which Krahe had grown intimately familiar in her past life. She had even changed the burster shell to imitate that very armament — the GT-08 Nacht Autonomous Tactical Nanochaff Emitter. Infamous for its employment of overzealous short-lifespan nanomachines that, with some adjustments, could be made to strip those caught in the cloud of their clothes, skin, and more if they were unlucky, or caught in multiple consecutive blasts.
Krahe mentally named this variant the Swarm Burster, and willed the swarm to disperse. Within moments, it blew away in the wind.
A standard burster came next, and its evolution was, in some ways, disappointing. The thunderous impact and brilliant flare of its detonation tore up the ground and the scornbeast’s corpse in equal measure, but that was it. A high-explosive grenade was a high-explosive grenade, it couldn’t be anything else. Out of curiosity, Krahe made it smaller, enveloping this explosive in a second shell, which she filled with what she intended to be flammable pitch, liquid enough to spread, but viscous and sticky. The actual explosive core was fairly weak, just strong enough that its detonation would expel and ignite the burning pitch. She also imbued the intention for it to detonate on impact, then threw it at the scornbeast’s back. Another explosion, much smaller this time. An inferno of scarlet flame spilled out, eating away at skin and flesh and bone more like a corrosive than a fire. It burned for only a few seconds, rather than the minutes of burn time a real Fortune Arms T73 B&P Naphos incendiary grenade could sustain. The stench, at least, was true to its inspiration, that is to say vile beyond description.
She considered how she might convey this napalm-esq property to a Swarm Burster, but the simplest application didn’t quite work right, so she filed the idea away for later and decided to finally deal with the corpse. It was far too large to stuff into her Kenoma Sack, and she somewhat doubted Rocinante could drag it along, even if she somehow conjured up an enormous corpse-towing apparatus. Seeing as she had no other recourse, Krahe brought out her eyebox to document it, planning to cut up and burn the thing once she was done.
Round and round she went, taking pictures, but the waterfall of blood never came. In fact, the scornbeast’s omniphage-infused blood, perhaps by design or perhaps as an unintended effect of its death, began devouring the enormous corpse. It spread and consumed, bit by bit; within mere minutes, only a pile of bones and grafts remained of the beast. Well, that and the Red Omniphage — that amorphous, sloshing, undulating mass of liquidized flesh. As the body broke down and the omniphage-mass grew, Krahe backed away and even remounted Rocinante, just in case. She didn’t want to just leave it here for the same reason she didn’t want to flee from the Scornbeast itself. The mass remained attached to a head-sized, hexagonal container, and just as it began trying to pull away and towards Krahe, a light came alive on the vessel.
It was a simple projector lens of the same type as those found on eyeboxes, and projected plain text in bright, fluorescent cyan.
WARNING IS VISIBLE = HOST BODY COMPROMISED
STAND CLEAR
The projection shifted, and with it, so did part of the container. Some mechanism inside it whirred and whined, drawing the omniphage back in until it filled the vessel, barely diminishing the visible mass in the process. The projection shifted.
PROBLEM
RAMPANCY+OVERGROWTH
It held for a few seconds. Then, another shift.
SOLUTION
ABLATION+RECONTAINMENT
BEGIN
A shockwave reverberated through the omniphage, and it halted. Something shifted inside the mass, steam began to rise from its surface, and then came the boiling, and the screeching. It was the sound of steam, escaping through what narrow openings its pressure could pry open, but its pitch undeniably carried the tone of a creature in utter agony. The omniphage roiled and undulated in place, bubbling and shrinking bit by agonizing bit, and soon enough, its surface dried, cracked, then caught fire.
The entire mass soon burst, just as a half-ton calorie-junkie impaled on the nozzle of an industrial air compressor might do. Its boiled gore scattered all around, coating the scornbeast’s remains in a thick layer of pulpy slurry. A moment later, again in a wave spreading from the container, the slurry calcified into a steaming, plaster-like substance.
Finally, the canister’s projection shifted again, hanging for a few moments before it flickered out.
RECONTAINMENT SUCCESSFUL
ROOT CULTURE PURIFICATION: 296:21:09
